The visualization breaks down the musical world into its plethora of sub-genres – be it classic rock, east coast hip-hop or progressive metal. The timeline uses aggregated data from Google Play Music to show musical popularities as they transitioned through time (like the move from classic metal, to thrash to alt metal).

Once you’ve drilled down to your selected genre, the timeline takes on a distinctive audio wave form – showing the popularity of the music by volume as it progresses through the decades. Once you’ve gone that deep, the timeline shows the ebb and flow of popular individual artists or bands and displays a short bio and relevant albums. From there it’s a quick click into the Google Play store where you can either purchase the track or give it a free short listen. Very cool.